Luke's Books

Carol Sklenicka. Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life

2010-01-02T08:57:00.000-08:00

On the "daemonic compulsiveness" of a writer:

[This is about Raymond Carver taking a creative writing class from John Gardner at Chico State in 1959, before either of them was anyone:] These first-day pyrotechnics were meant to intimidate students who weren't serious. Carver stuck. "... I'd never laid eyes on a writer. And he was a writer, even though he hadn't published at the time." Gardner thought that writers had to possess particular traits -- "verbal sensitivity, accuracy of eye, and a measure of the special intelligence of the storyteller" -- and he believed he could help his students develop those traits. Gardner thought, he wrote in On Becoming a Novelist, that a novelist needs "almost daemonic compulsiveness." Gardner had that, even though to Ray he looked like a "square" in his "dark, severe-looking clothes." He was thin with fine facial features, a pale complexion made more dramatic by thick, black, crew-cut hair, and enormous energy. No doubt Carver expected a writer to have the means and discernment to own a stylish car, because he noted with disappointment that Gardner's black four-door Chevrolet with black-wall tires "didn't even have a car radio." More to Ray's taste was the fact that Gardner sat on his desk and chain-smoked in class. (pp. 65-66)

You don't have to be published, but you do have to write:

Perhaps the most useful thing Carver learned from Garner was that a serious and passionate writer might also be an unpublished writer. When Carver used Gardner's office, he saw stacks of correspondence from other writers and editors and boxes of manuscripts, including an early version of Nickel Mountain, a novel he later published, heaped on the floor beside the desk. Carver was desperate to publish, but the sight of those stacks of pages gave him reason to hope and be patient in the years to come. (p. 69)

You don't need A's; you just need to write:

Although Ray wrote some "superb" papers for his literature classes, he asked [Richard Cortez] Day [at Humboldt State College] at the end of one course, "How would you feel if I don't turn the paper in?" In reply, Day asked his student how he'd feel about a C. "Ray replied, 'Fine.' Because he was working on a story. So, like anybody with any sense [Day recalls], Ray chose the story." And took the C. (p. 78)

Iowa Workshop director Paul Engle and his staff understood that talented writers were often imperfect scholars. On the strength of Ray's writing samples, his As in English, and a letter of recommendation from Day, Carver was admitted. Engle offered him a $1,000 fellowship for the year. (p. 86)

On Carver's "consuming interest":

I don't know that there is ever any explanation for a drunk's being a drunk, but in my opinion [recalled Curtis Johnson, one of Carver's early publishers] , just my theory -- he couldn't stand the little hurts that people inflicted on each other; I'm not talking about self-pity -- he just wanted to get along so that he could write. That was his consuming interest. And conversation was fine, camaraderie was fine, making love was fine, raising a family was okay, but it interfered with his writing. He just wanted to write. And why he wanted to write is as inexplicable as why he wanted to get drunk. Maybe they have the same root cause. It's likely. (p. 152)

On making luck happen:

The most impassioned passage of his [Carver's] introduction [to Best American Short Stories 1986] is about luck:

"Once in a great while lightning strikes .... It may hit the man or woman who is or was your friend, the one who drank too much, or not at all, who went off with someone's wife, or husband, or sister, after a party you attended together. The young writer who sat at the back of the class and never had anything to say about anything. The dunce, you thought. The writer who couldn't, not in one's wildest imaginings, make the list of top ten possibilities."

Ray had been all of the people he lists -- the drunk and the teetotaler, the philanderer, the dunce. He knew that there was no assurance that the best writers enjoy the most success. But he'd also been the one that lightning struck. So he believed that it was all right to help his friends. Who else would? ... Thus he balanced the odds, had his cake and ate it, too, and tried to keep everyone happy. Lightning strikes, he continues, "But it will never, never happen to those who don't work hard at it and who don't consider the act of writing as very nearly the most important thing in their lives, right up there next to breath, and food, and shelter, and love, and God." (pp. 439-40).

And don't forget the paper clip:

"But at that moment [concludes Carver's short story "Errand"] the young man was thinking of the cork still resting near the toe of his shoe. To retrieve it he would have to bend over, still gripping the vase. He would do this. He leaned over. Without looking down, he reached out and closed it into his hand."

With a gesture known to no one except the waiter, this ending represents a restoration of order.... Either Carver or [Tess] Gallagher might have found a hint for closing the story in this piece of advice from Raymond Chandler: "They [readers of detective fiction] thought they cared nothing about anything but the action. The things they really cared about, and that I cared about, were the creation of emotion through dialogue and description; the things they remembered, that haunted them, were not for example that a man got killed, but that in the moment of his death he was trying to pick a paper clip up off the polished surface of a desk." (Carol Sklenicka, Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life. Scribner, 2009, p. 452)

(Although The New York Times Book Review listed this biography as one of the top 10 books of 2009, I wouldn't recommend it, particularly. While its account of Carver's life is remarkable -- the years of struggle, endless writing, and poverty; a marriage, a wife and children, all sacrificed on the altar of Carver's craft; hair-raising accounts of Carver's alcoholism -- the biography smells of index cards and makes the exhausting, laborious process of crafting this biography look exhausting and laborious. If sprezzatura is the art of making the difficult look easy, its antonym should be sweatzzatura -- the art of making the difficult look difficult. And besides, what author -- or editor -- for that matter should settle for two "writer's" in the same sentence, much less for the tired cliche, "had his cake, and eat it, too"? Nonetheless, I thought that the comments on the writer's craft and its -- on how hard you need to want to write, on what it costs to make "luck" happen -- were worth the price of admission.)

David Foster Wallace. Infinite Jest

2009-09-27T11:34:00.000-07:00

In outline, it eventually boiled down to this: a desperate Barry Loach -- with Mrs. L. not on 25 mg. of daily Ativan and just about camped out in front of the candle-lighting apse of the Loach's parish church -- Loach challenges his brother to let him prove somehow -- risking his own time, Barry's, and maybe safety somehow -- that the basic human character wasn't as unempathetic and necrotic as the brother's present depressed condition was leading him to think. After a few suggestions and rejections of bits too way-out even for Barry Loach's desperation, the brothers finally settle on a, like, experimental challenge. The spiritually despondent brother basically challenges Barry Loach to not shower or change clothes for a while and make himself look homeless and disreputable and louse-ridden and clearly in need of basic human charity, and to stand out in front of the Park Street T-station stemming change, and for Barry Loach to hold out his unclean hand and instead of stemming change simply ask passersby to touch him. Just to touch him. Viz. extend some basic human warmth and contact. And this Barry does. And does. Days go by. His own spiritually upbeat constitution starts taking blows to the solar plexus. It's not clear whether the verminousness of his appearance had that much to do with it; it just turned out that standing there outside the station doors and holding out his hand and asking people to touch him ensured that just about the last thing any passerby in his right mind would want to do was touch him. It's possible that the respectable citizenry with their bookbags and cellulars and dogs with little red sweater-vests thought that sticking one's hand way out and crying 'Touch me, just touch me, please' was some kind of new stem-type argot for "lay some change on me,' because Barry Loach found himself hauling in a rather impressive daily total of $ -- significantly more than he was earning at his work-study job wrapping ankles and sterilizing dental prostheses for Boston College lacrosse players. Citizens found his pitch apparently just touching enough to give him $; but B. Loach's brother -- who often stood there in collarless mufti up against the plastic jam of the T-station's exit, slouched and smirking and idly shuffling a deck of cards in his hands -- was always quick to point out the spastic delicacy with which the patrons dropped change or $ into Barry Loach's hand, these kind of bullwhip-motions or jagged in-and-outs like they were trying to get something hot off a burner, never touching him, and they rarely broke stride or even made eye-contact as they tossed alms B.L's way, much less ever getting their hand anywhere close to contact with B.L's disreputable hand. The brother not unreasonably nixed the accidental contact of one commuter who'd stumbled as he tried to toss a quarter and then let Barry break his fall, not to mention the bipolarly ill bag-lady who got Barry Loach in a headlock and tried to bite his ear off near the end of the third week of the Challenge. Barry L. refused to concede defeat and misanthropy, and the Challenge dragged on week after week, and the older brother got bored eventually and stopped coming and went back to his room and waited for the St. John's Seminary administration to give him his walking papers, and Barry Loach had to take Incompletes in the semester's Training courses, and got canned from his work-study job for not showing up, and he went through weeks and then months of spiritual crisis as passerby after passerby interpreted his appeal for contact as a request for cash and substituted abstract loose change for genuine fleshly contact; and some of the T-station's other disreputable stem-artists became intrigued by Barry's pitch -- to say nothing of his net receipts -- and started themselves to take up the cry of 'Touch me, please, please, someone!,' which of course further compromised Barry Loach's chances of getting some citizen to interpret his request literally and lay hands on him in a compassionate and human way; and Loach's own soul began to sprout little fungal patches of necrotic rot, and his upbeat view of the so-called normal and respectable human race began to undergo dark revision; and when the other scuzzy and shunned stem-artists of the downtown district treated him as a compadre and spoke to him in a collegial way and offered him warming drinks from brown-bagged bottles he felt too disillusioned and coldly alone to be able to refuse, and thus started to fall in with the absolute silt at the very bottom of the metro Boston socio-economic duck-pond. And then what happened with the spiritually infirm older brother and whither he fared and what happened with his vocation never gets resolved in the E.T.A. Loach-story, because now the focus becomes all Loach and how he was close to forgetting -- after all these months of revulsion from citizens and his getting any kind of nurturing or empathetic treatment only from homeless and addicted stem-artists -- what a shower or washing machine or a ligamental manipulation even were, much less career-ambitions or a basically upbeat view of indwelling human goodness, and in fact Barry Loach was dangerously close to disappearing forever into the fringes and dregs of metro Boston street life and spending his whole adult life homeless and louse-ridden and stemming in the Boston Common and drinking out of brown paper bags, when along toward the end of the ninth month of the Challenge, his appeal -- and actually also the appeals of the other dozen or so cynical stem-artists right alongside Loach, all begging for one touch of a human hand and holding their hands out -- when all these appeals were taken literally and responded to with a warm handshake -- which only the more severely intoxicated stemmers didn't recoil from the profferer of, plus Loach -- by E.T.A.'s own Mario Incandenza, who'd been sent dashing out from the Back Bay co-op where his father was filming something that involved actors dressed up as God and the Devil playing poker with Tarot cards for the soul of Cosgrove Watt, using subway tokens as the ante, and Mario's been sent dashing out to get another roll of tokens from the nearest station, which because of a dumpster-fire near the entrance to the Arlington St. station turned out to be Park Street, and Mario, being alone and only fourteen and largely clueless about anti-stem defensive strategies outside T-stations, had had no one worldly or adult along with him there to explain to him why the request of men with outstretched hands for a simple handshake or High Five shouldn't automatically be honored and granted, and Mario had extended his clawlike hand and touched and heartily shaken Loach's own fuliginous hand, which led through a convoluted but kind of heartwarming and faith-reaffirming series to circumstances to B. Loach, even w/o an official B.A., being given and Asst. Trainer's job at E.T.A., a job he was promoted from just months later when the then-Head Trainer suffered the terrible accident that resulted in all locks being taken off E.T.A. saunas' doors and the saunas' maximum temperature being hard-wired down to no more than 50 [degrees] C. (pp. 969-71)

(A day after we went to see Avatar, James Cameron's latest, predictable, but nonetheless miraculous sci-fi extravaganza, my son asked me if I had thought about it at all. I hadn't. "See?" he said, "told you it wasn't any good." If turning it over in your mind, brooding about it, watching its ripples wash up against the shores of your own fears and anxieties and dreams -- if thinking about it again is any measure of artistic success (and I think it is) then surely David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest is one of the most memorable, hence best (?) novels I've read in the past decade. Not that I'm recommending it, exactly, no more than I'd recommend a car wreck or a fall on a roped climb, but once you start its some 1100 pages (including 100 pages and 400 footnotes), it's hard to stop; and once you've finished, it's impossible to forget this alternately stunning, memorable, and shattering novel, as much as you'd like to. Ostensibly, it's a novel about a film called "Infinite Jest" but referred to as "The Entertainment" -- a film so mesmerizing, that its viewers die watching and rewatching it -- and about a group of Quebeci terrorists who are trying to get their hands on the Master Copy, so that they can distribute it on the Internet and terrorize America. But what it's really about is America's self-indulgences, its addictions to pleasure, and its addictions to addictions, whether films (like Avatar, I suppose), heroine, cocaine, Demerol, pills, pot, booze, and more. And what's really stunning about the novel is the extent to which these addictions, the size and nature of the black holes that addicts dig for themselves, is spelled out in such excruciating and horrifying detail that, when my sister asked me what it was like to read the book, I said without skipping a beat or giving it a thought, that it was like eating broken glass. So like I said, I'm not exactly recommending it. Its chief figure (as opposed to hero) is Hal Incandenza, a tennis star at a tennis prep school (DFW was himself a tennis star in his youth), whose mother's distance and father's suicide have left him a hollowed-out, pot-smoking shell. And then there's Dan Gately, a recovering addict at a half-way house in Boston, a moose of a man who nearly dies from a gunshot wound while saving the life of Lenz, a despicable fellow resident of the half-way house; and then who nearly dies again in the hospital, wracked with pain, refusing the Demerol that will surely cut short his recovery, his last-ditch attempt to get his life back, to stay straight, staying alive. Multiply these harrowing addictions by a dozen, and you've got a kind of unforgettable, post-modern Ulysses -- a meticulous dissection of America's self-indulgences and pathologies, at once tormented and compassionate, that anticipates DFW's own life-long depression and suicide this past spring. All in all, it's a harrowing performance -- as dishevelled and ungainly as one of Thomas Wolfe's manuscripts, badly in need of a Max Perkins --written by a genius and polymath in a singular, haunted voice, chasing down his own demons -- and as impossible to read, as impossible to turn off as "The Entertainment" itself. Not surprisingly, David Foster Wallace received a McArthur ("Genius") Award in response to the novel, which was surely the death of him. In requiescat pasce.)

Tim Winton. Cloudstreet

2009-01-02T13:13:00.000-08:00

It's quiet for a few moments and then they begin to sing, and once they start it's hard to give it up, so they set up a great train of songs from school and church and wireless, on and on in the dark until they're making them up and starting all over again to change the words and the speed. Quick isn't afraid, and he knows Fish is alright. He lies back with his eyes closed. The whole boat is full of their songs -- they shout them up at the sky until Fish begins to laugh. Quick stops singing. It's dead quiet and Fish is laughing like he's just found a mullet in his shorts. It's a crazy sound, a mad sound, and Quick opens his eyes to see Fish standing up in the middle of the boat with his arms out like he's gliding, like he's a bird sitting in an updraught. The sky, packed with stars, rests just above his head, and when Quick looks over the side he sees the river is full of sky as well. There's stars and swirl an space down there and it's not water anymore -- it doesn't even feel wet. Quick stabs his fingers in. There's nothing there. there's no lights ashore now. No, There's no shore at all, not that he can see. There's only sky out there, above and below, everywhere to be seen. Except for Fish's giggling, there's no sound at all. Quick knows he is dreaming. This is a dream. He feels a turd shunting against his sphincter. He's awake, alright. But it's a dream -- it has to be.
Are we in the sky, Fish?
Yes. It's the water.
What dyou mean?
The water. The water. I fly (114).

Is it the war that's done it to you?
It's all war, she said.
What is?
I don't know. Everythin. Raisin a family, keepin yer head above water. Life. War is our natural state.
Well, struggle maybe, said Lester.
No, no, it's war.
Ah, things come along. You take the good with the bad.
Oriel rears with sudden passion: No you don't. You know about boats. You can't steer if you're not going faster than the current. If you're not under your own steam then yer just debris, stuff floatin. We're not frightened animals, Lester, just waitin with some dumb thoughtless patience for the tide to turn. I'm not spendin my livin breathin life quietly takin the good with the bad. I'm not standing for the bad; bad people, bad luck, bad ways, not even bad breath. We make good, Lester. We make war on the bad and don't surrender.
Some things can't be helped.
Everything can be helped (pp. 229-30).

At dawn, and the first raw-throated stirrings of hidden birds, Cloudstreet floats soundlessly from the gloom to join the day. Down on the tracks a Fremantle freight creeps past under a limestone sky, and in her tent, towelling the water from her face and chest in a manner so delicate as to be secretive, and to someone who knew her, completely uncharacteristic, Oriel Lamb feels the vibrations in the duckboards. When she's finished washing she applies a little talcum powder and dresses in her floral frock, stockings and hardsoled sandals which look more like work boots with ventilators cut into them. She notes again the ugliness of her feet all distorted with corns and bunions. She still remembers her own bare running feet on the dirt of the home paddock when the world was a place given by God for the pleasures of children, when all that was good was unbroken (p. 251).

No. No. I'll stay a cop. But it's not us and them anymore. It's us and us and us. It's always us. That's what they never tell you. Geez, Rose, I just want to do right. But there's no monsters, only people like us. Funny, but it hurts (Tim Winton. Cloudstreet. Simon & Schuster / Scribner Paperback, 1991, p. 402).

(It's a rare novelist I can bear reading these days, which I intend as a comment on my (dis)abilities as a reader rather than on the novels themselves. But in too many, the details seem inconsequential, the prose style plodding or predictable, the characters as aimless as the plot itself. So it was a real pleasure this Christmas break to read Tim Winton's Dirt Music, which is about something like love and hope, rooted in the broken, unfamiliar soil of Western Australia. And then from there to Winton's magnum opus, Cloudstreet, a great, sprawling novel, a cross between Dickens and Faulkner -- the tale of two over-sized families, the Pickles and the Lambs, tripping over one another in an equally over-sized mansion in Perth during WWII and then in the 50's and 60's. It's hard to say what makes this novel so great -- in part, its elegance and eloquence; in part, its quirky humor (including a talking pig and an addled young man named Fish who appears to glow at times); in part, its love of its extraordinary cast of characters, not despite but because of their gloomy passions, quirks, and obsessions; and in part for its faith and resilience. Among many things, Tim Winton's in love with music, and the lilt and thump and beat and rhythm of instruments and songs make these broken lives whole. I really loved this novel. It was one of those rare books that, once finished, sends you back to the beginning, half because you can't bear to let it go, and half because you want to find out what else the author has written, because you can't let him (or her) go either.)

Robert Clark. Dark Water

2008-11-17T12:34:00.000-08:00

You could have called the gaps that needed to be filled [in Cimabue's Crocifisso] injuries, insults, and wounds to the figure of Christ except for the fact that they were more akin to decapitation, dismemberment, or flaying. The forehead and right side of the face were destroyed. So too was the center of the torso, the breastbone and heart down to the navel; and so too the left-hand side of the rib cage, upward to the armpit. . . . The palms of both hands were destroyed precisely in the places where Christ's real wounds ought to have been.

All that would be covered in chromatic abstraction -- in what from a distance would look like a loosely woven mat of green-gold flesh -- and perhaps abstraction was precisely the right word. Because when on the tenth anniversary of the flood the Crocifisso was returned to Santa Croce, you could not say it had been restored in the sense that something that had once been part of it and lost had now been put back; or could you say that the wounds had been closed or healed. Rather, they'd become like the phantom limbs of an amputee: they were, for all their self-evident absence, still there, still palpable to the eye even as the eye registered the space they'd once occupied and moved on. In sum, what was once concretely present and then concretely absent in the Crocifisso was now present again, but as an abstract presence. You couldn't put your finger or eye on it, but your mind grasped its reality, the specter of what had been lost (pp. 249-50).

Beauty, like truth, was supposed to be timeless, but the fact was that beauty was always falling apart or decaying. It needed constant shoring up, and the labor could make you weary. Beauty was, al fondo, in the final analysis, very like human flesh and bone. In Florence, where they'd made so much of it, there was that much more of it to break or injure. Left alone, without restauro, it would all eventually disappear. Really, art was always dying, beauty forever decaying. "I had not known death had undone so many," Dante marveled. . . .

But the art in an artwork might not be located precisely where you thought it was. Perhaps it was just as much in the damage and decay as it was in the intact original. Perhaps it was in the gaps -- in contemplating and tending those insults and injuries -- that we find ourselves, by compassion; by bandaging, however imperfectly, those wounds. Art may be a species of faith, the assurance of things hoped for. It contains nothing so much as our wish that we persist (Robert Clark. Dark Water: Flood and Redemption in the City of Masterpieces. New York: Doubleday, 2008, p. 258).

(Robert Clark went to Florence on a fellowship to write about the intersection of art, beauty, and faith, and discovered instead the devastation of the flood of November 4, 1966 -- the destruction of human lives and of tens of thousands of manuscripts and priceless works of art. Clark's eloquent and moving account of loss and restauro, restoration, is in part a celebration of the angeli del fango -- the "mud angels" -- students from around the world who dropped everything to spend years of their lives retrieving and washing and drying out the manuscripts. But this extraordinary work's brooding account of the destruction and restoration of priceless masterpieces -- especially Cimabue's ground-breaking Crucifixion -- turns this into a tale of not only the restoration and loss of art and beauty, but of faith itself.)

David Foster Wallace. Consider the Lobster

2008-09-28T16:14:00.000-07:00

The intimacy of the whole thing is maximized at home, which of course is where most lobster gets prepared and eaten (although note already the semiconscious euphemism "prepared," which in the case of lobsters really means killing them right there in our kitchens). The basic scenario is that we come in from the store and make our little preparations like getting the kettle filled and boiling, and then we lift the lobsters out of the bag or whatever retail container they come in ... whereupon some uncomfortable things start to happen. However stuporous a lobster is from the trip home, for instance, it tends to come alarmingly to life when placed in boiling water. If you're tilting it from a container into the steaming kettle, the lobster will sometimes try to cling to the container's sides or even to hook its claws over the kettle's rim like a person trying to keep from going over the edge of a roof. And worse is when the lobster's fully immersed. Even if you cover the kettle and turn away, you can usually hear the cover rattling and clanking as the lobster tries to push it off. Or the creature's claws scraping the sides of the kettle as it thrashes around. The lobster, in other words, behaves very much as you or I would behave if we were plunged into boiling water (with the obvious exception of screaming). A blunter way to say this is that the lobster acts as if it's in terrible pain, causing some cooks to leave the kitchen altogether and to take one of those little lightweight plastic oven-timers with them into another room and wait until the whole process is over ("Consider the Lobster," pp. 247-48).

The psychology of jokes helps account for part of the problem in teaching Kafka. We all know that there is no quicker way to empty a joke of its peculiar magic than to try to explain it -- to point out, for example, that Lou Costello is mistaking the proper name Who for the interrogative pronoun who, and so on. And we all know the weird antipathy such explanations arouse in us, a feeling of not so much boredom as offense, as if something has been blasphemed. This is a lot like the teacher's feelings at running a Kafka story through the gears of your standard undergrad critical analysis -- plot to chart, symbols to decode, themes to exfoliate, etc. Kafka, of course, would be in a unique position to appreciate the irony of submitting his short stories to this kind of high-efficiency critical machine, the literary equivalent of tearing the petals off and grinding them up and running the goo through a spectrometer to explain why a rose smells so pretty. Franz Kafka, after all, is the story writer whose "Poseidon" imagines a sea god so overwhelmed with administrative paperwork that he never gets to sail or swim, and whose "In the Penal Colony" conceives description as punishment and torture as edification and the ultimate critic as a needled harrow whose coup de grace is a spike through the forehead (David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster [Back Bay Books, 2006], "Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness," pp. 61-62.)

(I'm really sorry that it was only upon news of his untimely death that I picked up David Foster Wallace's brilliant, eclectic, and subversive collection of essays -- partly because it's ghoulish, but more partly because I've not had the past decade to get to know him better. At any rate, I think these essays are terrific: typically, "Consider the Lobster," which was supposed to be a review of the Maine Lobsterfest for Gourmet magazine, turns into an inquiry into animal cruelty, just as "Up, Simba," a remarkably prescient essay on the 2000 Presidential campaign of John McCain, turns into a manic meditation on the ways in which such campaigns strip human beings of their humanity. Among other things, the remaining essays hang out in Las Vegas at an annual porn awards event (same theme) and review Bryan Garner's Dictionary of Modern American Usage in order to distinguish levels of usage from Standard English. There's also a review of Tracy Austin's memoir, in order to ask how and why a tennis star can play so smart and sound so dumb. But he's terrifically disturbing too: it's like watching an extremely intelligent version of an 18th century scientist dissecting the nerves, ganglia, vessels, and innards of our post-modern society in search of the soul / truth, only to find it exasperatingly elusive and, inevitably, out of reach. His other collection of essays is A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, and yes, I know, he's most famous for his 1000-page + novel Infinite Jest, which I'm still working up the courage [and looking for the time] to read. Maybe next summer.)

C.S. Lewis. The Discarded Image

2008-09-11T11:38:00.000-07:00

In modern, that is, in evolutionary, thought Man stands at the top of a stair whose foot is lost in obscurity; in this [Medieval Model], he stands at the bottom of a stair whose top is invisible with light (pp. 74-75).

To look out on the night sky with modern eyes is like looking out over a sea that fades away into mist, or looking about one in a trackless forest -- trees forever and no horizon. To look up at the towering medieval universe is much more like looking at a great building. The 'space' of modern astronomy may arouse terror, or bewilderment or vague reverie; the spheres of the old present us with an object in which the mind can rest, overwhelming in its greatness but satisfying in its harmony. That is the sense in which our universe is romantic, and theirs was classical (p. 99).

Whatever else a modern feels when he looks at the night sky, he certainly feels that he is looking out -- like one looking out from the saloon entrance on to the dark Atlantic or from the lighted porch upon dark and lonely moors. But if you accepted the medieval Model you would feel like one looking in. The Earth is 'outside the city wall'. When the sun is up he dazzles us and we cannot see inside. Darkness, our own darkness, draws the veil and we catch a glimpse of the high pomps within; the vast, lighted concavity filled with music and life (pp. 118-19).

Historically as well as cosmically, medieval man stood at the foot of a stairway; looking up, he felt delight. The backward, like the upward, glance exhilarated him with a majestic spectacle, and humility was rewarded with the pleasures of admiration. And, thanks to his deficiency in the sense of period, that packed and gorgeous past was far more immediate to him than the dark and bestial past could ever be to a Lecky or a Wells. It differed from the present only by being better. Hector was like any other knight, only braver. The saints looked down on one's spiritual life, the kings, sages, and warriors on one's secular life, the great lovers of old on one's own amours, to foster, encourage, and instruct. There were friends, ancestors, patrons in every age. One had one's place, however modest, in a great succession; one need be neither proud nor lonely (C.S. Lewis. The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Cambridge University Press, 1964, p. 185).

(About once every five years I find myself re-reading CS Lewis's luminescent account of the medieval world view, in order to remind myself of why I became a medievalist in the first place. Elsewhere he contrasts the modern view of darkness, which is pervasive except where it is interrrupted by sunlight, to that of the middle ages, which regarded night as but a temporary shadow cast by the earth in the path of the sun -- a shadow cast upon a lawn on a sunny day. Increasingly, however, I've had my misgivings about this happy cosmology. In the final chapter, CS Lewis responds to what seems to be the only possible objection: that it's not true. (To which he replies that we have created an alternate model of the universe for our own age ["nature gives most of her evidence in answer to the questions we ask her" (p. 223)].) But there is something unnerving and finally wrong about this comfortable hierarchical arrangement, in which God is in the heavens and all is right with the world -- "the rich man in his castle, / The poor man at his gate, / He made them, high or lowly, / And ordered their estate." It's always been CS Lewis's argument, like Milton's, that we only find true freedom once we discover our true place in the universe -- that Satan, in contrast, was free only to jump off a cliff. But try telling that to the peasantry, the vast majority of the medieval populace, the 90% who lived like animals in grinding obscurity and poverty, no more valued than their cattle -- try telling them that, having found their place at the rich man's gate, that only then were they truly free. It's a self-satisfied, rich man's vision of life that seeks to preserve the status quo -- a stay against confusion, as Robert Frost once said of rhyme; but a stay against liberty and equality as well.)

Ingrid Rowland. Giordano Bruno: Philosopher, Heretic

2008-09-09T12:31:00.000-07:00

"Mercury: [Jove has] ordered that today at noon two of the melons in Frather Franzino's melon patch will be perfectly ripe, but that they won't be picked until three days from now, when they will no longer be considered good to eat. He requests that at the same moment, on the jujube tree at the base of Monte Cicala in the house of Giovanni Bruno, thirty perfect jujubes will be picked, and he says that seven shall fall to earth still green, and that fifteen shall be eaten by worms. That Vasta, wife of Albenzio Savolino, when she means to curl the hair at her temples, shall burn fifty-seven hairs for having let the curling iron get too hot, but she won't burn her scalp and hence shall not swear when she smells the stench, but shall endure it patiently. That from the dung of her ox fifty-two dung beetles shall be born, of which fourteen shall be trampled and killed by Albenzio's foot, twenty-six shall die upside down, twenty-two shall live in a hole, eighty shall make a pilgrim's progress around the yard, forty-two shall retire to live under the stone by the door, sixteen shall roll their ball of dung wherever they please, and the rest shall scurry around at random. Luarenza, when she combs her hair, shall lose seventeen hairs and break thirteen, and of these, ten shall grow back within three days and seven shall never grow back at all." (from Bruno's Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast; Rowland, p. 17)

"The stupid, insensitive idolaters had no reason to laugh at the magic and divine religion of the Eygyptians, who in every cause and every effect, according to the principles appropriate to each, contemplated divinity, and knew how to obtain the benefits of Nature by means of the species that are in her womb: just as she gives fish from sea and river, wild animals from the desert, metals from mines, fruits from trees, so from certain parts, certain animals, certain beasts, certain plants, there are offered certain destinies, powers, fortunes, and impressions. Hence the divinity in the sea was called Neptune, in the sun, Apollo, in the earth, Ceres, in the desert, Diana, and so differently in the other species, all of which refer back to a god of gods and wellspring of all ideas that exists above nature. That god, being absolute, has nothing to do with us, but inasmuch as he is communicated through the effects of nature and is more intimate to them than nature herself, if he is not nature per se, certainly he is the nature of nature and is the soul of the soul of the world...." (from Bruno's Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast; Rowland p. 166)

"It is truly, O most generous Sir [Sir Philip Sidney], the work of a low, filthy animal nature to have made oneself the constant admirer, and to have fixed a solicitous attachment upon or around the beauty of a woman's body. Good God! What more vile and ignoble vision can present itself to a clear-sighted eye than a man, brooding, afflicted, tormented, sorry, melancholy; who waxes now cold, now hot, now boiling, now trembling, now pale, now flushing, now in a pose of perplexity, now in the act of decisiveness, a man who spends the best season and the choicest fruits of his life distilling the elixir of his brain toward putting into thought and writ and sealing in public monuments those endless tortures, those grave torments, those reasoned arguments, those laborious thoughts and those bitter desires addressed to the tyranny of an unworthy, imbecilic, foolish and sordid smut?" (from Bruno's dedication to the Heroic Frenzies; Rowland, p. 175)

"It happens that, against every reason, state, and nature, human law and consequently the true order of Almighty God instilled in all things, the bonds of nature lie unbound, and by the suggestion of misanthropic spirits and the ministry of hell's Furies (who fan the flames among nations rather than bringing peace, and insert the sword of dissent between those who are most closely joined, selling themselves as Mercuries descended from heaven among their tricks and their many pretenses), it has come to the point that humanity quarrels most of all with itself, and is more contested by itself than by any other living creature, and that the law of love that is spread far and wide lies everywhere neglected, which derives not from some evil demon but certainly from God the father of all things, so that it is in harmony with all nature, and teaches a general philanthropy by which we love even our enemies, lest we become like brutes and barbarians, and are transformed into his image who makes his sun rise over good and bad, and pours out a rain of grace upon the just and the unjust. This is the religion that I observe...." (from Bruno's 120 Articles against Mathematicians and Philosophers; Ingrid Rowland. Giordano Bruno: Philosopher / Heretic. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008, p. 207)

(Although the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake by the Inquisition in 1600 for his reservations about the nature of Christ, transubstantiation, and the Virgin Mary, among other things, he is often considered today as a martyr for science. Like Copernicus, he turned his back on the Ptolemaic, geocentric universe and its implicit hierarchies in behalf of a heliocentric universe. But more than that, he believed in a multiplicity of worlds -- that our earth and sun are no different from an infinite number of solar systems presided over by an infinite God, who has been worshipped by many religious traditions. Stressing Bruno's neo-Platonism, Rowland's biography draws on a rich wealth of materials; more of her literate, readable, fascinating essays on figures of the Italian Renaissance, first published in the New York Review of Books, are collected in From Heaven to Arcadia. (Incidentally, I take no particular pleasure in reproducing Bruno's misogynistic diatribe, which he wrote in response to Sidney's anxious love sonnets in Astrophil and Stella -- it's Bruno's attempt to persuade Sidney to seek out the love of God instead. For the roots of this anti-feminist tradition, see especially Francis Utley's The Crooked Rib.) At any rate, I thought this was a fascinating story of a Dominican monk who sought to free his God from the constraints of his age, and who was killed for his troubles. His books were placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1603. 400 years later, during the papacy of John Paul II, the Catholic Church expressed its sorrow for Bruno's death.)

Evelyn Waugh. Brideshead Revisited

2008-08-18T12:55:00.000-07:00

That day, too, I had come not knowing my destination. It was Eights Week. Oxford--submerged now and obliterated, irrecoverable as Lyonnesse, so quickly have the waters come flooding in--Oxford, in those days, was still a city of aquatint. In her spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman's day; her autumnal mists, her grey springtime, and the rare glory of her summer days--such as that day--when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas, exhaled the soft vapours of a thousand years of learning. It was this cloistral hush which gave our laughter its resonance, and carried it still, joyously, over the intervening clamour (p. 21).

I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole.

My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time.

These memories, which are my life--for we possess nothing certainly except the past--were always with me. Like the pigeons of St. Mark's, they were everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of their necks, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder or pecking a broken biscuit from between my lips; until, suddenly, the noon gun boomed and in a moment, with a flutter and sweep of wings, the pavement was bare and the whole sky above dark with a tumult of fowl. Thus it was that morning (Evelyn Waugh. Brideshead Revisited [Little, Brown, 1945], p. 225).

(Although Evelyn Waugh's account of England's smart set in the 1920's and 30's is probably better read in one's youth, along with the novels of Thomas Wolfe, I thought it was interesting on a couple of counts -- in part, for its nostalgic longing for England's pre-WWI past; in part for its aversion to modernity (apparently he regarded James Joyce's later novels with the same loathing and despair that some regard our own post-modern age), and more in part for its conservative embrace of traditional Catholic faith. In this regard, his account of the drunken Sebastian Flyte, who ends up in a monastery near the end of the novel, is reminiscent of Graham Greene's whiskey priest in Power and the Glory, or even of the fallen Kichijiro in Shusaku Endo's Silence. While the tale of the narrator's off, on, off-again love for Sebastian's sister, Julia, is the stuff of which Hollywood films are made, and while the prose is as baroque as the fountain at the doorstep of the Brideshead mansion, I still think Waugh is an exquisite stylist, in love with the rhythms of the English language. I also think that Waugh is half in love with the debauchery that the novel ostensibly condemns. As in Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale, there is a genuine tension here between the novel's sermon and its unsettling affection for bone marrow and spices -- for the very whiskey, wine, and cocktails that flow throughout these tipsy pages.)

Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace

2008-08-18T11:47:00.000-07:00

"What is it? am I falling? are my legs giving way under me?" he thought, and fell on his back. He opened his eyes, hoping to see how the fight between the French and the artillerists ended, and wishing to know whether or not the red-haired artillerist had been killed, whether the cannon had been taken or saved. But he did not see anything. There was nothing over him now except the sky--the lofty sky, not clear, but still immeasurably lofty, with gray clouds slowly creeping across it. "How quiet, calm, and solemn, not at all like when I was running," thought Prince Andrei, "not like when we were running, shouting, and fighting; not at all like when the Frenchman and the artillerist, with angry and frightened faces, were pulling at the swab--it's quite different the way the clouds creep across this lofty, infinite sky. How is it I haven't seen this lofty sky before? And how happy I am that I've finally come to know it. Yes! everything is empty, everything is a deception, except this infinite sky. There is nothing, nothing except that. But there is not even that, there is nothing except silence, tranquility. And thank God!..." (p. 281).

War isn't courtesy, it's the vilest thing in the world, and we must understand that and not play at war (p. 775).

Napoleon, whom we imagine as guiding this whole movement (as a savage imagines that the figure carved on the prow of a ship is the force that guides it), Napoleon, during all this time of his activity, was like a child who, holding the straps tied inside a carriage, fancies that he is driving it (p. 1008).

There is no greatness where this is no simplicity, goodness, and truth (p. 1071).

Though the doctors treated him [Pierre], let his blood, and gave him medications to drink, he nevertheless recovered (p. 1102).

"Once we're thrown off our habitual paths, we think all is lost; but it's only here that the new and the good begins" (p. 1118).

All the ancient historians used one and the same method to describe and grasp the seemingly ungraspable--the life of a people. They described the activity of individual men who ruled the people; and this activity expressed for them the activity of the whole people.

To the questions of how individual men made peoples act according to their will, and what governed the will of these men themselves, the ancients answered the first question by recognizing the will of a divinity who subjected peoples to the will of one chosen man, and the second by recognizing that the same divinity guided the will of the chosen one towards a predestined goal.

For the ancients, these questions were decided by faith in the direct participation of a divinity in the affairs of mankind.

Modern history, in its theory, has rejected both of these propositions (p. 1179).

For a historian, considering the contribution rendered by some person towards a certain goal, there are heroes; for the artist, considering the correspondence of this person to all sides of life, there cannot and should not be any heroes, but there should be people.

The historian is sometimes obliged, by bending the truth, to bring all the actions of a historical figure under the one idea he has put into that figure. The artist, on the contrary, sees the very singularity of that idea as incompatible with his task, and only tries to understand and show not the famous figure but the human being (p. 1219).

In descriptions of battles it is usually written that such-and-such army was sent to attack such-and-such point and was then ordered to retreat, and so on, as if supposing that the discipline that makes tens of thousands of men obey the will of one man on the drill ground will have the same effect where it is a matter of life and death. Anyone who has been to war knows how incorrect that is; and yet official reports are based on this supposition, and military descriptions on them. Make the rounds of a whole army right after a battle, even on the second or third day, before the reports have been written, and ask all the soldiers, the senior and junior officers, how it went; they will tell you what all these men experienced and saw, and you will form a majestic, complex, infinitely diverse, oppressive, and vague impression; and from no one, least of all the commander in chief, will you learn how it all went. But after two or three days, the reports begin to be submitted, talkers begin telling how what they did not see happened; finally, a general account is put together, and the general opinion of the army is put together from this account. It is a relief to everyone to exchange his doubts and questions for this false but clear and always flattering picture (Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace, transl. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky [Knopf, 2007], p. 1220).

(Although Tolstoy's massive, epic account of Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812 (war) and of the lives of the Russian aristocracy (peace) who became entangled in the Napoleonic wars threatens to turn into a "large, loose, baggy monster," as Henry James once wrote, it is also magnificent and moving. Among many things, its interwoven tales of the idealist Pierre, who fumbles for and finds wisdom, of Natalie, coming of age, of boys dashing off to battle-- all of these and many, many more are stories of how very little we are, and yet how very much each of us matters in the scheme of things. Given post-modernity's interest in wresting the pen from out of Shakespeare's fingers, however, and placing it in the hand of society (for which see Greenblatt's Will in the World and, more broadly, Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel), I was especially fascinated by Tolstoy's debunking of the myth of the Napoleonic hero already in the mid-nineteenth century. The result is, as Tolstoy wrote of the fog of war, an account of history and humanity that is "majestic, complex, [and] infinitely diverse" (p. 1220). While it is not, perhaps, the after-action report to which we have become accustomed in this internet age, it's the stuff of life itself. And Pevear and Volokhonsky's agile, readable translation has truly brought all this life, to life.)

T.E. Lawrence. Seven Pillars of Wisdom

2008-07-14T09:29:00.000-07:00

In the very outset, at the first meeting with them [Arabs], was found a universal clearness or hardness of belief, almost mathematical in its limitation, and repellent in its unsympathetic form. Semites had no half-tones in their register of vision. They were a people of primary colours, or rather of black and white, who saw the world always in contour. They were a dogmatic people, despising doubt, our modern crown of thorns. They did not understand our metaphysical difficulties, our introspective questionings. They knew only truth and untruth, belief and unbelief, without our hesitating retinue of finer shades (p. 39).

Three hours later we were on the move again, helped now by the last shining of the moon. We marched down Wadi Mared, the night of it dead, hot, silent, and on each side sharp-pointed hills standing up black and white in the exhausted air. There were many trees. Dawn finally came to us as we passed out of the narrows into a broad place, over whose flat floor an uneasy wind span circles, capriciously in the dust. The day strengthened always, and now showed Bir ibn Hassani just to our right. The trim settlement of absurd little houses, brown and white, holding together for security's sake, looked doll-like and more lonely than the desert, in the immense shadow of the dark precipice of Subh, behind. While we watched it, hoping to see life at its doors, the sun was rushing up, and the fretted cliffs, those thousands of feet above our heads, became outlined in hard refracted shafts of white light against a sky still sallow with the transient dawn (p. 85).

The Turks were stupid; the Germans behind them dogmatical. They would believe that rebellion was absolute like war, and deal with it on the analogy of war. Analogy in human things was fudge, anyhow; and war upon rebellion was messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife (p. 193).

Nasir rolled over on his back, with my glasses, and began to study the stars, counting aloud first one group and then another; crying out with surprise at discovering little lights not noticed by his unaided eye. Auda set us on to talk of telescopes -- of the great ones -- and of how man in three hundred years had so far advanced from his first essay that now he built glasses as long as a tent, through which he counted thousands of unknown stars. 'And the stars -- what are they?' We slipped into talk of suns beyond suns, sizes and distance beyond wit. 'What will now happen with this knowledge?' asked Mohammed. 'We shall set to, and many learned and some clever men together will make glasses as more powerful than ours, as ours than Galileo's; and yet more hundreds of astronomers will distinguish and reckon yet more thousands of now unseen stars, mapping them, and giving each one its name. When we see them all, there will be no night in heaven.'

'Why are the Westerners always wanting all?' provokingly said Auda. 'Behind our few stars we can see God, who is not behind your millions.' 'We want the world's end, Auda.' 'But that is God's,' complained Zaal, half angry. (pp. 281-82).

Fellows were very proud of being in my bodyguard, which developed a professionalism almost flamboyant. They dressed like a bed of tulips, in every colour but white; for that was my constant wear, and they did not wish to seem to presume. In half an hour they would make ready for a ride of six weeks, that being the limit for which food could be carried at the saddle-bow. Baggage camels they shrank from as a disgrace. They would travel day and night at my whim, and made it a point of honour never to mention fatigue. If a new man grumbled, the others would silence him, or change the current of his complaint, brutally (pp. 465-66).

In my saddle-bags was a Morte d'Arthur. It relieved my disgust (T.E. Lawrence. Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph. Garden City Publishing, 1938, p. 485).

Lawrence "of Arabia's" autobiographical account of his role in the Arabs' guerilla warfare against the Turks during WWI, culminating in the seizure of Damascus, is remarkable and moving on a number of counts: in part, for his extraordinary love of the Arabs and their way of life; in part, for the vivid, detailed, and eloquent depiction of the desert landscape; and, in part too, for the anguish with which it is written, torn as the author was between the interests of British imperialism and his hopes for Arab self-rule, largely dashed at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. Then, too, the account is streaked with cheeky, even subversive impudence, a boyish idealism nurtured on medieval romance (he wrote his senior thesis at Oxford on castles constructed during the Crusades), and a complex mixture of self-love and self-loathing, providing us, perhaps, with one of the first, complicated 20th-century heroes. Revolt in the Desert, without all the accounts of gravel along the way, is his abridgement of Seven Pillars. For other good books on Arabian territories, see especially Thesinger's Arabian Sands. Charles Doughty's Arabia Deserta is the grand-daddy of them all (Lawrence wrote the introduction to its reprinted edition in the 20's), and Jonathan Raban's Arabia is a briefer and more accessible overview. (Others say that Betram Thomas's Arabia Felix is also good, but I've not read it.) As for T.E. Lawrence himself -- it turns out there's an entire industry devoted to the man, a half-dozen biographies, collections of letters, accusations (he sold out the Arabs, he was an egotist, a liar) and defenses, psychoanalyses of an extremely complicated life, and more. In the meanwhile, I thought Seven Pillars was really quite magnificent!

Herman Melville. Moby Dick

2008-07-03T16:27:00.000-07:00

I [Ishmael] am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it -- would they let me -- since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in (Ch. 1; p. 8).

Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man [Ahab], chasing with curses a Job's whale round the world, at the head of a crew, too, chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals -- morally enfeebled also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness in Starbuck, the invulnerable jollity of indifference and recklessness in Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask. Such a crew, so officered, seemed specially picked and packed by some infernal fatality to help him to his monomaniac revenge. How it was that they so aboundingly responded to the old man's ire -- by what evil magic their souls were possessed, that at times his hate seemed almost theirs; the White Whale as much their insufferable foe as his; how all this came to be -- what the White Whale was to them, or how to their unconscious understandings, also, in some dim, unsuspected way, he might have seemed the gliding great demon of the seas of life,-- all this to explain, would be to dive deeper than Ishmael can go. The subterranean miner that works in us all, how can one tell whither leads his shaft by the ever shifting, muffled sound of his pick? Who does not feel the irresistible arm drag? What skiff in tow of a seventy-four can stand still? For one, I gave myself up to the abandonment of the time and the place; but while yet all arush to encounter the whale, could see naught in that brute but the deadliest ill (Ch. 41; pp. 186-97).

Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.

Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return! (Ch. 58; pp. 274-75).

Standing at the mast-head of my ship during a sunrise that crimsoned sky and sea, I once saw a large herd of whales in the east, all heading towards the sun, and for a moment vibrating in concert with peaked flukes. As it seemed to me at the time, such a grand embodiment of adoration of the gods was never beheld, even in Persia, the home of the fire worshippers. As Ptolemy Philopater testified of the African elephant, I then testified of the whale, pronouncing him the most devout of all beings. For according to King Juba, the military elephants of antiquity often hailed the morning with their trunks uplifted in the profoundest silence (Ch. 86; p. 374).

The smoke rolled away in sullen heaps. To every pitch of the ship there was a pitch of the boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness to leap into their faces. Opposite the mouth of the works, on the further side of the wide wooden hearth, was the windlass. This served for a sea-sofa. Here lounged the watch, when not otherwise employed, looking into the red heat of the fire, till their eyes felt scorched in their heads. Their tawny features, now all begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards, and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these were strangely revealed in the capricious emblazonings of the works. As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander's soul (Ch. 96; p. 417).

Oh, grassy glades! oh, ever endless landscapes in the soul; in ye,--though long parched by the dead drought of the earthy life,--in ye, men yet may roll, like young horses in new morning clover; and for some few fleeting moments, feel the cool dew of the life immortal on them. Would to God these blessed calms would last. But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm. There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause:--through infancy's unconscious spell, boyhood's thoughtless faith, adolescence' doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood's pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally. Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling's father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it (Ch. 114; p. 481).

Suddenly the waters around them slowly swelled in broad circles; then quickly upheaved, as if sideways sliding from a submerged berg of ice, swiftly rising to the surface. A low rumbling sound was heard; a subterraneous hum; and then all held their breaths; as bedraggled with trailing ropes, and harpoons, and lances, a vast form shot lengthwise, but obliquely from the sea. Shrouded in a thin drooping veil of mist, it hovered for a moment in the rainbowed air; and then fell swamping back into the deep. Crushed thirty feet upwards, the waters flashed for an instant like heaps of fountains, then brokenly sank in a shower of flakes, leaving the circling surface creamed like new milk round the marble trunk of the whale (Herman Melville. Moby-Dick or, The Whale. Commentary by Howard Mumford Jones. WW Norton, 1976, Ch. 135, p. 555).

(What a magnificent book! Having attempted to read this great American novel a half-dozen times in my life, I've finally read it through, luxuriating in its breathtaking magnificence. After stumbling through way too many contemporary novels filled with the meaningless detritus of daily life, the idle, aimless chit chat of Pulp Fiction, what a relief and a pleasure to read a novel that is not only about a madman, a ship, and a whale, but about everything else as well! I suppose when I was younger I couldn't bear it, partly because of its ambiguity and partly because of the notoriously lengthy passages in which Melville anatomizes the ribs of both the whaling industry and the sperm whale itself, but as a result the whale takes on a life of its own by the end of the novel -- it's not difficult to picture this novel as an early ecological diatribe against capitalism and greed -- and its complex, brooding portrait of the entanglements of good and the ill within all of us suits me just fine.)

A.J. Liebling. Liebling Abroad

2008-06-13T11:45:00.000-07:00

The worst thing an interviewer can do is talk a lot himself. Just listening to reporters in a barroom, you can tell the ones who go out and impress their powerful personalities on their subject and then come back and make up what they think he would have said if he had had a chance to say anything. One of the best preps I ever did was for a profile of Eddie Arcaro, the jockey. When I interviewed him the first question I asked was, "How many holes longer do you keep your left stirrup than your right?" Most jockeys on American tracks ride longer on their left side. That started him talking easily, and after an hour, during which I had put in about twelve words, he said, "I can see you've been around riders a lot." I had, but only during the week before I was to meet him ([The Road Back to Paris, "My Generals, My Generalissimo"] p. 29).

On the day after I checked into my hotel I went down to the beach to swim. After swimming I sat on the terrace of the bathing pavilion, drinking vermouth and eating remarkably good olives. The vermouth was called the Vermouth of the Good Jesus. (There is a bank in Lisbon called the Bank of the Holy Ghost and of Commerce.) The pavilion people gave you a whole tumblerful of olives with each drink. There were a few German refugee families about, sitting at little tables under beach umbrellas and tremulous with masochistic fear as usual, happily certain that everything was going to turn out for the worst. An Englishman whom I had met at the bar of my hotel sat down next to me, already tight as a tick although it was just midmorning, and began telling me how he personally had piloted the plane that brought Franco from the Canaries to Spain.... There was a public-address system at the bathing pavilion, and the management played phonograph records over it, usually Carmen Miranda. But just as I was sipping the Vermouth of the Good Jesus and wondering whether I ought to knock out the Englishman's brain with an olive pit, adapting the size of the missile to the importance of the target, the phonograph soloist put on a record of Charles Trenet singing "Boum!" The salt water and the sun and the vermouth had put me in a good frame of mind; the happy Parisian tune and the crazy lyric had an exaggerated effect upon me. I looked at the sadist and the masochists and said to myself, "They will both be disappointed." And I remembered something said to me by an old man who had been the last bare-knuckle lightweight champion of the world and had retired undefeated. This old boy was named Jack McAuliffe, and he had told me, "In Cork, where I was born, there was an old saying: "'Once down is no battle'" ([The Road Back to Paris, "Once Down is No Battle] p. 91).

When we were at Gafsa, we slept on the concrete floor of a small French barracks, which was used as a catch-all hostel for transient officers. In one corner of the barracks, a captain from an American armored-infantry regiment had spread his bedding roll. His outfit had not been involved in the day's action and he had been out in the field in a jeep as an observer of fighting methods. He was a florid, pleasant-faced blond of twenty-seven, and he was reading by the light of a candle he had placed next to one elbow on the floor. We said hello and walked over to talk to him. He was reading Douglas Southall Freeman's "Lee's Lieutenants," which Norgaard had also read, and they got to talking about it. The captain told us that he came from the battlefield region of Virginia, where children save Minie balls instead of Indian arrowheads, and that he knew old Dr. Freeman well. "I own a house at Yellow Tavern, where Jeb Stuart was killed," he said, "and there are some Yankee musket balls in the stair rail. When I was a boy, I used to walk over the battlefields with Dr. Freeman, and he would tell me where the different regiments had stood and where they had charged or retreated and who had been killed and where. I often used to dream of battles when I was a boy. I thought of them like an illustration in a book, all blue and gray and orange and blood-red, and not very noisy." He closed his book and lay down, ready to go to sleep. "My God!" he said. "If I had known they were like this!" I thought of a line in Stendhal's diary: "All my life I have longed to be loved by a woman who was melancholy, thin, and an actress. Now I have been, and I am not happy" [Mollie & Other War Pieces, "For Boots Norgaard"] p. 306).

The Proust madeleine phenomenon is now as firmly established in folklore as Newton's apple or Watt's steam kettle. The man ate a tea biscuit, the taste evoked memories, he wrote a book. This is capable of expression by the formula TMB for Taste > Memory > Book. Some time ago, when I began to read a book called The Food of France, by Waverly Root, I had an inverse experience: BMT, for Book > Memory > Taste. Happily, the tastes that The Food of France re-created for me -- small birds, stewed rabbit, stuffed tripe, Cote Rotie, and Tavel -- were more robust than that of the madeleine, which Larousse defines as "a light cake made with sugar, flour, lemon juice, brandy, and eggs." (The quantity of brandy in a madeleine would not furnish a gnat with an alcohol rub.) In the light of what Proust wrote with so mild a stimulus, it is the world's loss that he did not have a heartier appetite. On a dozen Gardiners Island oysters, a bowl of clam chowder, a peck of steamers, some bay scallops, three sauteed soft-shelled crabs, a few ears of fresh-picked corn, a thin swordfish steak of generous area, a pair of lobsters, and a Long Island duck, he might have written a masterpiece ([Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris, "A Good Appetite"] p. 581). (Liebling Abroad, intro. by Raymond Sokolov. Playboy Press, 1981.)

A writer for The New Yorker and other publications for 40 years, A. J. Liebling's skeptical ear, keen eye, and elegant, jazzy improvs on the English language introduced us to the new journalism while Tom Wolfe was still in diapers. Having lived in Paris in his youth, he finagled an assignment to Paris at the outset of WWII, and from there he spent time with the troops in Northern Africa. Equally mad about food, wine, women, boxing, and the English language -- he pretty much ate himself to death -- his collection of essays from the 40s and 50s eschews the overblown rhetoric of his predecessors and has a heart for the common man, for the diversity of human experience. (In this respect, he reminds me of Joseph Mitchell, his companion at The New Yorker, whose Up in the Old Hotel and Joe Gould's Secret are among the most compassionate, intelligent, readable pieces of non fiction I know of.) I think Liebling is a terrific writer -- his dazzling linguistic pirouettes always leave me dizzy with pleasure and the indignation that rumbles just beneath his lines provide his essays with a kind of moral weight. David Remnick has recently edited another collection of his essays, called Just Enough Liebling -- but it's not enough. Liebling died on December 30, 1963, and Joseph Mitchell delivered the eulogy.

Timothy Brook. Vermeer's Hat

2008-03-03T08:17:00.000-08:00

Seen in this way, the paintings into which we will look to find signs of the seventeenth century might be considered not just as doors through which we can step to rediscover the past, but as mirrors reflecting the multiplicity of causes and effects that have produced the past and the present. Buddhism uses a similar image to describe the interconnectedness of all phenomena. It is called Indra's net. When Indra fashioned the world, he made it as a web, and at every knot in that web is tied a pearl. Everything that exists or has ever existed, every idea that can be thought about, every datum that is true -- every dharma, in the language of Indian philosophy -- is a pearl in Indra's net. Not only is every pearl tied to every other pearl by virtue of the web on which they hang, but on the surface of every pearl is reflected every other jewel in the net. Everything that exists in Indra's web implies all else that exists. (p. 22)

If Donne in 1623 was excited to discover that no person was an island, it was because, for the first time in human history, it was possible to realize that almost no one was. No longer was the world a series of locations so isolated from each other that something could happen in one and have absolutely no effect on what was going on in any other. The idea of a common humanity was emerging, and with it the possibility of a shared history. The theology underpinning Donne's sense of the interconnectedness of all things is Christian, but the idea of mutual interconnection is not exclusive to Christianity. Other religious and secular logics are capable of supporting the same conclusion, and equally effective at provoking an awareness of our global situation and our global responsibility. As across Donne's continent, so in Indra's web: every clod, every pearl -- every loss and death, birth and coming into being -- affects everything else with which it shares existence. (p. 221)

The first Spanish commander who went to Manila tricked Soliman into granting him territory at Manila. He used an old ruse, borrowed from the Aeneid, of asking for a piece of land no bigger than an ox hide. As a Chinese writer indignantly reports the story several decades later, "The Franks tore the ox hide into strips and joined them end to end to a length of a dozen kilometers which they used to mark out a piece of land, and then insisted that the rajah filfill his promise. He was surprised but could not go back on his word as a gentleman and had to grant permission." (Timothy Brook. Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World. New York and London: Bloomsbury Press, 2008, p. 162).

A lovely little book! Drawing upon a lifetime of Chinese studies to connect maps, bowls, tobacco, and more to artifacts and objects of art in Vermeer's paintings, Brook provides an elegant and eloquent teasing out of the threads that bind us one to another. Indra's web puts me in mind of Bill Moyers's interview with the classics philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who speaks movingly of the fragility of goodness -- of the web of connections that ties one good life to another, so that each person's loss and sorrow is ours. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, writes Donne. It tolls for thee.

Walter Isaacson. Einstein: His Life and Universe

2008-02-19T08:15:00.000-08:00

It seems impossible to read about Einstein, without collecting the pithy aphorisms that come leaking from his mouth and pen. I'll confess to happily succumbing to this temptation:

-- Imagination is more important than knowledge. (p. 7)
-- Blind respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth. (67)
-- Subtle is the Lord, but malicious he is not. (297) [This in response to a Michelson-Morley experiment that seemed to show that ether existed and that the speed of light was variable.]
-- The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think. (299) [A U.S. reporter asked Einstein what the speed of sound was. Einstein said he didn't know.]
-- Anything truly novel is invented only during one's youth. Later one becomes more experienced, more famous--and more blockheaded. (316)
-- Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving. (367)
-- Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious. (384-85)

On loneliness:

He did not like to be constricted, and he could be cold to members of his family. Yet he loved the collegiality of intellectual companions, and he had friendships that lasted throughout his life. He was sweet toward people of all ages and classes who floated into his ken, got along well with staffers and colleagues, and tended to be genial toward humanity in general. As long as someone put no strong demands or emotional burdens on him, Einstein could readily forge friendships and even affections.

This mix of coldness and warmth produced in Einstein a wry detachment as he floated throughout the human aspects of his world. "My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and communities," he reflected. "I am truly a 'lone traveler' and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude." (274)

On Relativity and Relativism (Or, Einstein's quest for certainty)

For nearly three centuries, the mechanical universe of Isaac Newton, based on absolute certainties and laws, had formed the psychological foundation of the Enlightenment and the social order, with a belief in causes and effects, order, even duty. Now came a view of the universe, known as relativity, in which space and time were dependent on frames of reference. This apparent dismissal of certainties, an abandonment of faith in the absoute, seemed vaguely heretical to some people, perhaps even godless. "It formed a knife," historian Paul Johnson wrote in his sweeping history of the twentieth century, Modern Times, "to help cut society adrift from its traditional moorings." ...

Indirectly, driven by popular misunderstandings rather than a fealty to Einstein's thinking, relativity became associated with a new relativism in morality and art and politics. There was less faith in absolutes, not only of time and space, but also of truth and morality. In a December 1919 editorial about Einstein's relativity theory, titled "Assaulting the Absolute," the New York Times fretted that "the foundations of all human thought have been undermined."

Einstein would have been, and later was, appalled at the conflation of relativity with relativism. As noted, he had considered calling his theory 'invariance," because the physical laws of combined spacetime, according to his theory, were indeed invariant rather than relative.

Moreover, he was not a relativist in his own morality or even in his taste. "The word relativity has been widely misinterpreted as relativism, the denial of, or doubt about, the objectivity of truth or moral values," the philosopher Isaiah Berlin later lamented. "This was the opposite of what Einstein believed. He was a man of simple and absolute moral convictions, which were expressed in all he was and did."

In both his science and his moral philosophy, Einstein was driven by a quest for certainty and deterministic laws. If his theory of relativity produced ripples that unsettled the realms of morality and culture, this was caused not by what Einstein believed but by how he was popularly interpreted. (Walter Isaacson. Einstein: His Life and Universe. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007, pp. 277-78.)

(Nice biography -- readable, with good, accessible accounts of his contributions to science. Although I started skimming the second half of the biography, in which Einstein basically putters around the Institute of Advanced Studies trying to figure out a unified field theory -- and in which the biographer loses his interest as well -- the picture of Einstein drifting with the currents in his little sailboat, doing mathematical equations on a little notebook, is the quintessential picture of the active, contemplative life -- of the true Happiness that Aristotle longs for in Book X of his Ethics.)

Thucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War.

2008-02-02T11:45:00.000-08:00

So savage was the progress of this revolution [at Corcyra], and it seemed all the more so because it was one of the first which had broken out. Later, of course, practically the whole of the Hellenic world was convulsed, with rival parties in every state -- democratic leaders trying to bring in the Athenians, and oligarchs trying to bring in the Spartans.... In the various cities these revolutions were the cause of many calamities -- as happens and always will happen while human nature is what it is, though there may be different degrees of savagery, and, as different circumstances arise, the general rules will admit of some variety. In times of peace and prosperity cities and individuals alike follow higher standards, because they are not forced into a situation where they have to do what they do not want to do. But war is a stern teacher; in depriving them of the power of easily satisfying their daily wants, it brings most people's minds down to the level of their actual circumstances.

So revolutions broke out in city after city, and in places where the revolutions occurred late the knowledge of what had happened previously in other places caused still new extravagances of revolutionary zeal, expressed by an elaboration in the methods of seizing power and by unheard-of atrocities in revenge. To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings. What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party membership; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one's unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action. Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man, and to plot against an enemy behind his back was perfectly legitimate self-defence. Anyone who held violent opinions could always be trusted, and anyone who objected to them became a suspect. To plot successfully was a sign of intelligence, but it was still cleverer to see that a plot was hatching.... If an opponent made a reasonable speech, the party in power, so far from giving it a generous reception, took every precaution to see that it had no practical effect. (3.82) (Tansl. Rex Warner. Penguin Books, 1954)

(Savior of the West against Persian aggression and the paragon of democratic ideals, 5th-century Athens accumulated a war chest and an empire that none in the Mediterranean could rival. And then, as the result of an interminable war, arrogance and atrocity, and a disastrous expedition to the distant island of Sicily, it all went -- as the Brits say -- to smash. No wonder that Thucydides' judicious, cold-blooded account of the rise and fall of the Athenian empire has been the reading of generals for the past four-hundred years. Or that Thomas Hobbes translated it from out of the Greek. For a footnote to the ways in which words lose their shape and meaning on the anvil of terror, see also George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language.")

Homer. The Iliad (transl. Robert Fagles)

2008-02-02T11:23:00.000-08:00

At last the armies clashed at one strategic point,
they slammed their shields together, pike scraped pike
with the grappling strength of fighters armed in bronze
and their round shields pounded, boss on welded boss,
and the sound of struggle roared and rocked the earth.
Screams of men and cries of triumph breaking in one breath,
fighters killing, fighters killed, and the ground streamed blood.
Wildly as two winter torrents raging down from the mountains,
swirling into a valley, hurl their great waters together,
flash floods from the wellsprings plunging down in a gorge
and miles away in the hills a shepherd hears the thunder--
so from the grinding armies broke the cries and crash of war. (4.517-28)

"I put to my lips the hands of the man who killed my son."

Those words stirred within Achilles a deep desire
to grieve for his own father. Taking the old man's hand
he gently moved him back. And overpowered by memory
both men gave way to grief. Priam wept freely
for man-killing Hector, throbbing, crouching
before Achilles' feet as Achilles wept himself,
now for his father, now for Patroclus once again,
and their sobbing rose and fell throughout the house. (24.591-99)

They reached out for the good things that lay at hand
and when they had put aside desire for food and drink,
Priam the son of Dardanus gazed at Achilles, marveling
now at the man's beauty, his magnificent build --
face-to-face he seemed a deathless god . . .
and Achilles gazed and marveled at Dardan Priam,
beholding his noble looks, listening to his words.
But once they'd had their fill of gazing at each other,
the old majestic Priam broke the silence first:
"Put me to bed quickly, Achilles, Prince.
Time to rest, to enjoy the sweet relief of sleep." (24.738-48)

(In Preface to Paradise Lost, C.S. Lewis speaks of Homer's despair, but I disagree. There is no more moving passage in western literature than the reconciliation of Achilles and Priam -- the exhausted killer and the grief-stricken father of Hector, whom Achilles has slain. In a world that pits us against them, the victor against the enemy, the profoundly silent moment in the close of this tumultuous, bloody epic, in which the two take their fill of one another -- this moment speaks more in its silence and peace than most of us, with all of our words and ideologies.)

Rick Atkinson. The Day of Battle.

2008-01-22T16:04:00.000-08:00

The first stray shell hit the abbey [of Monte Cassino] in mid-January. The monks went about their daily rituals, which began with matins before dawn. Seven more times during the day they assembled in the carved walnut choir stalls to recite the hours. The seventy-nine-year-old Abbot Diamare and his monks retreated to half a dozen rooms on two corridors of the lowest floor. German foragers confiscated fourteen cows and more than one hundred sheep, paying a pittance, and soon the remaining beasts, including goats, pigs, chickens, and donkeys were given sanctuary in the abbey. An entry in the abbey log pleaded, "May God shorten these terrible days."

Hundred of refugees sheltered against the outer walls, in farm buildings, and even in the rabbit warren. Artillery now rattled across the flanks of Monte Cassino, day and night, fraying nerves and killing innocents. A cannonade on the morning of Saturday, February 5, proved particularly unnerving. Forty terrified women rushed to the abbey's main gate, pleading for admission. Turned away by the reluctant monks, the women pounded on the oak door until their knuckles bled. "Insane with fear, they screamed, imploring asylum and even threatening to burn down the door," one account recorded.

The door swung open, the women rushed in. Soon dozens, then hundreds followed, until perhaps a thousand frightened people jammed the abbey. Fetid encampments sprung up in the porter's lodge and the post office, in the carpentry shop and the curial hall. Four hundred bivouacked on the abbey's grand staircase.

The monks chanted and prayed, seeking God's will in the liturgy of the hours. Day followed awful day, parsed by the rhythms of the divine office: matins, lauds, prime, terce, sext, none, vespers, compline. "Idleness is the enemy of the soul," Benedict had warned them. Beyond the stout walls, the artillery sang its canticles (p. 400).

The ruined abbey -- "that tomb of miscalculation," in one U.S. Army corporal's phrase -- quickly came to symbolize the grinding war of attrition that the Italian campaign had become. Fifth Army's latest seven-mile advance had exhausted eight divisions and cost sixteen thousand casualties....

Public opinion in the United States seemed largely indifferent to the destruction. Twenty-seven months of total war had severed sentimental attachments to the Monte Cassinos of this world. A Gallup poll taken shortly after the bombing found that if military leaders believed it necessary to bomb historical religious buildings and shrines in Europe, 74 percent of Americans would approve and only 19 percent disapprove. The wolf had risen in the heart at home, too.

Yet as shell fire and the odd bombing sortie continued to carve away Monte Cassino's crest, those entrenched in the Rapido flats could not help but feel that once again something had been lost in this dark epoch of loss. Even Major General Walker, whose 36th Division had been gutted on the Rapido in Cassino's shadow, felt unease. "Whenever I am offered a liqueur glass of benedictine," he wrote in his diary, "I shall recall with regret the needless destruction of the abbey." Of course the deeper regret extended beyond ecclesiastical landmarks. War was whittling it all away: civility and moderation, youth and innocence, mountains and men. (Rick Atkinson. The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944. New York: Henry Holt, 2007, p. 441.)

(Rick Atkinson's stunning follow-up to An Army at Dawn is simultaneously appalling and revealing for the extraordinary cost in lives of the Italian campaign -- a campaign fought, essentially, to lure German divisions away from both the Eastern front and from the impending invasion of Normandy. That the ancient Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino should have been unnecessarily bombed into ruins only extends the range of loss and devastation. This terrific account of what has increasingly become a footnote to D-Day brings home the monumental cost of the war -- not only in lives, but also in humanity. I'll look forward to the final volume of Atkinson's liberation trilogy -- not so much for battle strategy, as for vivid, eloquent glimpses of the lives common soldiers, all uncommon heroes.)

John Keegan. The First World War.

2008-01-06T16:55:00.000-08:00

They were not long stationary. Soon they would be moving, filled with hundreds of thousands of young men making their way, at ten or twenty miles an hour and often with lengthy, unexplained waits, to the detraining points just behind the frontiers. Long prepared, many of the frontier stations were sleepy village halts, where platforms three-quarters of a mile long had not justified the trickle of peacetime comings and goings. Images of those journeys are among the strongest to come down to us from the first two weeks of August 1914: the chalk scrawls on the waggon sides--"Ausflug nach Paris," and "a Berlin"--the eager young faces above the open collars of unworn uniforms, khaki, field-grey, pike-grey, olive-green, dark blue, crowding the windows. The faces glow in the bright sun of the harvest month and there are smiles, uplifted hands, the grimace of unheard shouts, the intangible mood of holiday, release from routine. Departure had everywhere been holidaylike, with wives and sweethearts, hobble-skirted, high-waisted, marching down the road to the terminus arm-in-arm with the men in the outside ranks. The Germans marched to war with flowers in the muzzles of their rifles or stuck between the top buttons of their tunics; the French marched in close-pressed ranks, bowed under the weight of enormous packs, forcing a passage between crowds overspilling the pavements. One photograph of Paris that first week of August catches a sergeant marching backwards before his section as they lean towards him, he like a conductor orchestrating the rhythm of their footfalls on the cobbles, they urgent with the effort of departure and the call to arms. An unseen band seems to be playing "Sambre-et-Meuse" or "le chant du depart." Russian soldiers paraded before their regimental icons for a blessing by the chaplain, Austrians to shouts of loyalty to Franz Joseph, symbol of unity among the dozen nationalities of his creaking empire. In whichever country, mobilization entailed enormous upheaval, the translation of civil society into the nation in arms. (John Keegan. The First World War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999, p. 74)

(By my book, John Keegan is the most literate, readable, and engaging of the historians of war, and this is an extraordinarily stunning account of what Europe still calls, justifiably, "the Great War." Compare the brief memorial plaque for the dead of WWII to the lengthy memorials to those who died in WWI in the entry way to many an English church, and you will comprehend the meaning of the word "great." For the counterpart to this joyful scene at the onset of WWI, check out Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War 6.30-31, in which Athens' vessels set out for the disastrous Sicilian expedition. And for another of Keegan's fine books, look up The Face of Battle -- Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme -- for the role of military technology on the battle front. For the preface to WWI, see especially Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower, about Europe oblivious, on the brink of disaster; and for its aftermath look up Macmillan and Holbrooke's Paris 1919, which is, basically, about why we spent the rest of the 20th century picking up the pieces of WWI. And just for the record, no, I didn't just read O'Brien, Hemingway, and Keegan: I just wanted to note these memorable passages in these extraordinary books, before they slipped through my fingers entirely.)

Rick Atkinson. An Army at Dawn

2008-01-02T11:11:00.000-08:00

To deal with the inevitable traffic fatalities a sliding scale of reparations was established, paid in the oversize French currency GIs called wallpaper: 25,000 francs ($500) for a dead camel; 15,000 for a dead boy; 10,000 for a dead donkey; 500 for a dead girl....

For the Yanks, it was all new: the skinned goat carcasses dripping blood in roadside stalls; the Algerians hawking grass mats and bolts of blue silk; the cursing muleteers; the peasants leaning into their iron-shod plows; the buses propelled by charcoal engines lashed to the bumper and stirred by each driver with a poker. American units chosen for the vanguard strutted with pride. The 2nd Battalion of the 13th Armored Regiment rolled out of Arzew toward Algiers and beyond, their tanks stuffed with eggs and hidden bottles of Old Grandad. The 5th Field Artillery Battalion swung onto the road with guidons snapping; each battery presented arms to the 1st Division color guard, and "When the Caissons Go Rolling Along" crashed from the division band.

Eastward the caissons rolled, past Algerian villages with adobe walls loopholed for muskets, past groves of mandarin oranges "hanging like red lamps." Past clopping French army columns of hay carts drawn by crow-bait horses, past mounted artillery officers in double-breasted tunics. Past stubbly wheatfields that had once served as Rome's granary, and past aqueducts dismembered during the Vandals' century of anarchic misrule and now bleaching like stone bones in the sun.

At dusk they bivouacked. Soldiers swam in the chill Mediterranean or washed from their helmets in the delicate ritual called a whore's bath. They staged scorpion fights in gasoline flimsies or spooned whiskey into pet lizards to watch them stagger about. The evening mist rose from fields with a scent like fresh-mowed hay, which troops had been taught was the odor of deadly phosgene; at least one unit panicked, with shrieks of "Gas! Gas!" and a mad fumbling for masks before reason returned. Soldiers sharpened their bartering skills with hand gestures, talking loudly in the distinctively American belief that volume obviates all language barriers; one sharp trader swapped a box of candy, piece by piece, for three bottles of perfume, a dozen eggs, a large portrait of Petain, and a small burro named Rommel (pp. 168-69).

Harold Macmillan, whose mother was from Indiana ("I am a Hoosier," he declared with perfect Oxbridge diction upon introducing himself to Eisenhower), advised a British officer: "You will find the Americans much as the Greeks found the Romans--great big vulgar, bustling people, more vigorous than we are and also more idle, with more unspoiled virtues, but also more corrupt. We must run AFHQ as the Greeks ran the operations of the Emperor Claudius" (p. 258).

Churchill, upon hearing Montgomery boast that abstinence made him "100 percent fit," replied that he both drank and smoked and was "200 percent fit" (p. 418).

[Omar Bradley] descended from hardscrabble Missouri farmers and one itinerant schoolteacher, his father. Eisenhower had contributed a generous accolade for his classmate's yearbook entry at West Point: "True merit is like a river, the deeper it is, the less noise it makes" (p. 485).

God's bounty meant nothing to these men. Beneath the vernal landscape every soldier now saw topography, just as a pathologist can see the skull beneath a scalp. A streambed was not a streambed but defilade; pastures were not pastures but exposed fields of fire. Laurel thickets became ambush sites, and every grove of cork trees might hide a German 88. No soldier could look at this corrupted terrain without feeling that it had become sinister and deeply personal. (Rick Atkinson. An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-43. New York: Henry Holt, 2002, pp. 480-81).

Washington Post journalist Rick Atkinson won the Pulitzer Prize for this first volume of his so-called Liberation Trilogy, the second volume of which, Day of Battle, treats the allied invasions of Sicily and Italy. (I suppose the third volume will have the word "dusk" or "night" in it.) It's a well-written and gripping account of the US and British invasion of Algeria and its assault on Tunis, and it's especially revealing on account of US naivete and incompetence -- the allies had a long ways to go, before they could work as a team, much less manage logistics and field maneuvers. Equally revealing is Atkinson's account of the education of Eisenhower, his generals, and his soldiers -- all of whom were obliged to learn the twin arts of self-confidence and ruthlessness. At any rate, Atkinson makes it clear that the US and English were in no shape to assault Fortress Europe in 1942 -- that they had very, very much to learn. The allies suffered 70,000 casualties in North Africa.

Ernest Hemingway. A Farewell to Arms.

2007-12-31T10:22:00.000-08:00

I did not say anything. I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates....

It stormed all that day. The wind drove down the rain and everywhere there was standing water and mud. The plaster of the broken houses was gray and wet. Late in the afternoon the rain stopped and from the number two post I saw the bare wet autumn country with clouds over the tops of the hills and the straw screening over the roads wet and dripping. The sun came out once before it went down and shone on the bare woods beyond the ridge. (Ernest Hemingway. A Farewell to Arms. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1929, pp. 196-97).

Tim O'Brien. The Things They Carried.

2007-12-31T09:44:00.000-08:00

The things they carried were largely determined by necessity. Among the necessities or near-necessities were P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wristwatches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of Kool-Aid, lighters, matches, sewing kits, Military Payment Certificates, C rations, and two or three canteens of water. Together, these items weighed between 15 and 20 pounds, depending upon a man's habits or rate of metabolism. Henry Dobbins, who was a big man, carried extra rations; he was especially fond of canned peaches in heavy syrup over pound cake. Dave Jensen, who practiced field hygiene, carried a toothbrush, dental floss, and several hotel-sized bars of soap he'd stolen on R&R in Sydney, Australia. Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried tranquilizers until he was shot in the head outside the village of Than Khe in mid-April. By necessity, and because it was SOP, they all carried steel helmets that weighed 5 pounds including the liner and camouflage cover. They carried the standard fatigue jackets and trousers. Very few carried underwear. On their feet they carried jungle boots -- 2.1 pounds -- and Dave Jensen carried three pairs of socks and a can of Dr. Scholl's foot powder as a precaution against trench foot. Until he was shot, Ten Lavender carried six or seven ounces of premium dope, which for him was a necessity. Mitchell Sanders, the RTO, carried condoms. Norman Bowker carried a diary. Rat Kiley carried comic books. Kiowa, a devout Baptist, carried an illustrated New Testament that had been presented to him by his father, who taught Sunday school in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. As a hedge against bad times, however, Kiowa also carried his grandmother's distrust of the white man, his grandfather's old hunting hatchet. Necessity dictated. Because the land was mined and booby-trapped, it was SOP for each man to carry a steel-centered, nylon-covered flak jacket, which weighed 6.7 pounds, but which on hot days seemed much heavier. Because you could die so quickly, each man carried at least one large compress bandage, usually in the helmet band for easy access. Because the nights were cold, and because the monsoons were wet, each carried a green plastic poncho that could be used as a raincoat or groundsheet or makeshift tent. With its quilted liner, the poncho weighed almost two pounds, but it was worth every ounce. In April, for instance, when Ted Lavender was shot, they used his poncho to wrap him up, then to carry him across the paddy, then to lift him into the chopper that took him away (pp. 4-5).

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil. Listen to Rat Kiley. Cooze, he says. He does not say bitch. He certainly does not say woman, or girl. He says cooze. Then he spits and stares. He's nineteen years old -- it's too much for him -- so he looks at you with those big sad gentle killer eyes and says cooze, because his friend is dead and because it's so incredibly sad and true: she never wrote back.

You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth; if you don't care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty (Tim O'Brien. The Things They Carried. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990, pp. 76-77).

(Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried and Michael Herr's Dispatches -- fiction and non-fiction, respectively -- are the two best books I've read on the Vietnam War. Both extraordinarily well-written, moving, vivid nightmares that strip war of every last shred of romance and hope.)

Dante. The Inferno (Hollander transl.)

2007-12-28T11:34:00.000-08:00

Midway in the journey of our life
I came to myself in a dark wood,
for the straight way was lost. (Inf. 1.1-3)

Paollo & Francesca:

"Love, quick to kindle in the gentle heart,
seized this man with the fair form taken from me.
The way of it afflicts me still.

Love, which absolves no one beloved from loving,
seized me so strongly with his charm that,
as you see, it has not left me yet.

Love brought us to one death.
Caina waits for him who quenched our lives....

... There is no greater sorrow
than to recall our time of joy
in wretchedness--and this your teacher knows.

But if you feel such longing
to know the first root of our love,
I shall tell as one who weeps in telling.

One day, to pass the time in pleasure,
we read of Lancelot, how love enthralled him.
We were alone, without the least misgiving.

More than once that reading made our eyes meet
and drained the color from our faces.
Still, it was a single instant overcame us:

When we read how the longed-for smile
was kissed by so renowned a lover, this man,
who never shall be parted from me,

all trembling, kissed me on my mouth.
A Galeotto was the book and he that wrote it.
That day we read no further. (Inf. 5.100-38)

On mentors:

But the mentor who had brought me there replied:
"Have no fear. None can prevent our passage,
so great a power granted it to us.

Wait for me here. Comfort your weary spirit
and feed it with good hope.
I will not forsake you in the nether world." (Inf. 8.103-108)

Lament for a teacher (here Brunetto Latini):

"If all my prayers were answered,"
I said to him, "You would not yet
be banished from mankind.

For I remember well and now lament
the cherished, kind, paternal image of You
when, there in the world, from time to time,

You taught me how man makes himself immortal.
And how much gratitude I owe for that
my tongue, while I still live, must give report." (Inf.15.7987)

On fame:

"Now must you cast off sloth," my master said.
"Sitting on feather cushions or stretched out
under comforters, no one comes to fame.

Without fame, he who spends his time on earth
leaves only such a mark upon the world
as smoke does on the air or foam on water." (Inf. 24. 46-51)

On fog:

As, when the mist is lifting,
little by little we discern things
hidden in the air made thick by fog. (Inf. 31.34-36)

On power:

For when the power of thought
is coupled with ill will and naked force
there is no refuge from it for mankind. (Inf. 31.55-57)

And for the terrifying story of Ugolino, gnawing forever at the head of his enemy, see Inf. 32.127 ff.

This is the Hollander translation of Dante, which I gather is better at its exhaustive and endlessly fascinating commentary than at the translation itself. One NYBReview, deftly comparing rhyme to the rocks that impede and alter the stream's flow, wrote of how much we lose when we fail to capture Dante's inter-locking terza rima. Having waited too long in my life to read Dante, I cannot say if this is so -- perhaps others will know of a "better" translation? In the meanwhile, Dante's haunting account of his journeys through the Inferno in Virgil's company is unexpectedly moving particularly because it is about the education of its narrator. Interminable references to Florentine figures and affairs make it difficult going, however -- and the commentary essential. I can't imagine how to teach this! Or, even, how to read it well.

David Halberstam. The Coldest Winter.

2007-11-04T16:31:00.000-08:00

Of the American military miscalculations of the twentieth century, Douglas MacArthur's decision to send his troops all the way to the Yalu stands alone. (Vietnam was a political miscalculation and the chief architects of it were civilians.) All sorts of red flags were there for him, flags that he chose not to see. So it was that his troops, their command split, their communications often dangerously weak, the weather worsening by the day, pushed north, while the Chinese watched and patiently waited for them on the high hills, already preparing to block the narrow arteries of retreat or escape. The same general who had argued for Inchon because of the vulnerability of the North Korean supply lines now allowed his own supply lines to grow dangerously long in territory over which he had no control. The same general who had wanted to land at Inchon because it might end the war quickly and spare his troops from fighting in the cruel Korean winter was now ready to send them farther north just as the Manchurian winter arrived. "One of the things I found hardest to understand--and to forgive as a commander," Matt Ridgway said nearly forty years later, "was how completely oblivious the Tokyo command was to the conditions under which our men would have to fight" (pp. 369-70).

The importance and value of a good, independent intelligence man in wartime can hardly be overemphasized. A great intelligence officer studies the unknown and works in the darkness, trying to see the shape of future events. He covers the sensitive ground where prejudice, or instinctive cultural bias, often meet reality, and he must stand for reality, even if it means standing virtually alone. Great intelligence officers often have the melancholy job of telling their superiors things they don't want to hear. A great intelligence officer tries to make the unknown at least partially knowable; he tries to think like his enemy, and he listens carefully to those with whom he disagrees, simply because he knows that he has to challenge his own value system in order to understand the nature and impulse of the other side (p. 378).

So the men of the Dai Ichi had doctored the intelligence in order to permit MacArthur's forces to go where they wanted to go militarily, to the banks of the Yalu. In the process they were setting the most dangerous of precedents for those who would follow them in office. In this first instance it was the military that had played with the intelligence, or more accurately, one rogue wing of the military deliberately manipulating the intelligence it sent to the senior military men and civilians back in Washington. The process was to be repeated twice more in the years to come, both subsequent times with the civilians manipulating the military, with the senior military men reacting poorly in their own defense and thereby placing the men under their command in unacceptable combat situations. (The title of a book by one talented young officer, H. R. McMaster, studying how the senior military had been snookered by the senior civilians' pressures during Vietnam, was Dereliction of Duty.) All of this reflected something George Kennan warned about, the degree to which domestic politics had now become a part of national security calculations, and it showed the extent to which the American government had begun to make fateful decisions based on the most limited of truths and the most deeply flawed intelligence in order to do what it wanted to do for political reasons, whether it would work or not. In 1965, the government of Lyndon Jonson manipulated the rationale for sending combat troops to Vietnam, exaggerating the threat posed to America by Hanoi, deliberately diminishing any serious intelligence warning of what the consequences of American intervention in Vietnam would be (and how readily and effectively the North Vietnamese might counter the American expeditionary force), and thereby committing the United States to a hopeless, unwinnable post-colonial war in Vietnam. Then in 2003, the administration of George W. Bush--improperly reading what the end of the Russian empire might mean in the Middle East; completely miscalculating the likely response of the indigenous people; and ignoring the warnings of the most able member of the George H.W. Bush national security team, Brent Scowcroft; and badly wanting for its own reasons to take down the government of Saddam Hussein--manipulated the Congress, the media, the public, and most dangerously of all, itself, with seriously flawed and doctored intelligence, and sent troops into the heart of Iraqi cities with disastrous results (David Halberstam. The Coldest Winter. New York: Hyperion, 2007, pp. 390-91).

(Completed just days before his untimely death, David Halberstam's stunning, gripping, and readable account of the little-known events of the Korean War is a textbook illustration of the adage that every good line of argument needs to be lifted aloft in it end, like a candle in a cave, in order that readers might see its larger significance -- here, the patterns of miscalculation and deceit that have led us into the quagmires of Vietnam [see Halberstam's Making of a Quagmire] and Iraq. More workmanlike than eloquent, The Coldest Winter nevertheless plays to Halberstam's strengths and experience as a journalist, seamlessly weaving into the historical record the voices of the survivors of that largely forgotten war.)

Denis Johnson. The Name of the World.

2007-09-14T07:52:00.000-07:00

This picture was an anonymous work that almost anybody on earth could have made, but as it happened, a Georgia slave had produced it. The work's owners, the Stone family of Camden County, had found the work in the attic of the family's old mansion. It was drawn with ink on a large white linen bedsheet and consisted of a tiny single perfect square at the center of the canvas, surrounded by concentric freehand outlines. A draftsman using the right tools would have made thousands of concentric squares with the outlines just four or five millimeters apart. But, as I've said, the drawing, except for the central square, had been accomplished freehand: Each unintended imperfection in an outline had been scrupulously reproduced in the next, and since each square was larger, each imperfection grew larger too, until at the outermost edges the shapes were no longer squares, but vast chaotic wanderings.

To my way of thinking, this secret project of the nameless slave, whether man or woman we'll never know, implicated all of us. There it was, all mapped out: the way of our greatness. Though simple and obvious as an act of art, the drawing portrayed the silly, helpless tendency of fundamental things to get way off course and turn into nonsense, illustrated the church's grotesque pearling around its traditional heart, explained the pernicious extrapolating rules and observances of governments--implicated all of us in a gradual apostasy from every perfect thing we find or make. (pp. 12-13)

As soon as we had our drinks in hand, Vince, talking over his shoulder the whole time, led me into the back room toward the dancing in which he'd claimed to have no interest. He stood well under six feet, but he had tremendous mass and solidity and moved like an ocean liner among the small tables. (p. 55)

The blond boy she'd been talking to sat two rows ahead of me. Once again it occurred to me--it more than occurred, the insight knocked the breath out of me--that the boy lived in a silence. Why on earth had he come? He sat quite still, completely self-possessed and perfectly alienated. For all he heard, he might have been in this chapel alone at midnight. Perhaps he was sensitive, in some tactile way, to an atmosphere thickened by hundreds of blended voices--how many? As the hymn swayed around me like wheat in a wind I found myself counting the house. Fourteen rows, about a dozen folks on each side of the aisle: nearly three hundred people, all singing beautifully. I wondered what it must sound like out in the empty green fields under the cloudless blue sky, how hearrtrendingly small even such a crowd of voices must sound rising up into the infinite indifference of outer space. I felt lonely for us all, and abruptly I knew there was no God. (Denis Johnson. The Name of the World. HarperCollins, 2000, p. 88)

(Johnson's doomed souls -- here a college prof goes to a department party, only to discover that his colleagues have gathered to celebrate the several years that he had spent with them --wander through a universe so barren and fallen, that it appears at times to posit the existence of God only in order to distinguish the past from the present, perfection from imperfection. I'm quite besotted with Johnson, whose indignant, savage, and compassionate eye sees everything.)

Dostoevsky. Brothers Karamazov.

2007-09-09T18:56:00.000-07:00

"It's not God that I [Ivan Karamazov] do not accept, you understand, it is this world of God's, created by God, that I do not accept and cannot agree to accept. With one reservation: I have a childlike conviction that the sufferings will be healed and smoothed over, that the whole offensive comedy of human contradictions will disappear like a pitiful mirage, a vile concoction of man's Euclidean mind, feeble and puny as an atom, and that ultimately, at the world's finale, in the moment of eternal harmony, there will occur and be revealed something so precious that it will suffice for all hearts, to allay all indignation, to redeem all human villainy, all bloodshed; it will suffice not only to make forgiveness possible, but also to justify everything that has happened with me--let this, let all of this come true and be revealed, but I do not accept it and do not want to accept it!" (p. 235-36)

"We have our historical, direct, and intimate delight in the torture of beating. Nekrasov has a poem describing a peasant flogging a horse on its eyes with a knout, 'on its meek eyes.' We've all seen that; that is Russianism. He describes a weak nag, harnessed with too heavy a load, that gets stuck in the mud with her cart and is unable to pull it out. The peasant beats her, beats her savagely, beats her finally not knowing what he's doing; drunk with beating, he flogs her painfully, repeatedly: 'Pull, though you have no strength, pull, though you die!' The little nag strains, and now he begins flogging her, flogging the defenseless creature on her weeping, her 'meek eyes.' Beside herself, she strains and pulls the cart out, trembling all over, not breathing, moving somehow sideways, with a sort of skipping motion, somehow unnaturally and shamefully--it's horrible in Nekrasov. But that's only a horse; God gave us horses so that we could flog them. So the Tartars instructed us, and they left us the knout as a reminder. But peoople, too, can be flogged. And so, an intelligent, educated gentleman and his lady flog their own daughter, a child of seven, with a birch--I [Ivan] have it written down in detail. The papa is glad that the birch is covered with little twigs, 'it will smart more,' he says, and so he starts 'smarting' his own daughter. I know for certain that there are floggers who get more excited with every stroke, to the point of sensuality, literal sensuality, more and more, progressively, with each new stroke. They flog for one minute, they flog for five minutes, they flog for ten minutes--longer, harder, faster, sharper. The child is crying, the child finally cannot cry, she has no breath left: 'Papa, papa, dear papa!'" (pp. 241-42)

"In my opinion, there is no need to destroy anything, one need only destroy the idea of God in mankind, that's where the business should start! One should begin with that, with that--oh, blind men, of no understanding! Once mankind has renounced God, one and all ..., then the entire old world view will fall of itself, without anthropophagy, and, above all, the entire former morality, and everything will be new. People will come together in order to take from life all that it can give, but, of course, for happiness and joy in this world only. Man will be exalted with the spirit of divine, titanic pride, and the man-god will appear. Man, his will and his science no longer limited, conquering nature every hour, will thereby every hour experience such lofty delight as will replace for him all his former hopes of heavenly delight. Each will know himself utterly mortal, without resurrection, and will accept death proudly and calmly, like a god. Out of pride he will understand that he should not murmur against the momentariness of life, and he will love his brother then without any reward. Love will satisfy only the moment of life, but the very awareness of its momentariness will increase its fire..." (pp. 648-49)

"The elder of the two [brothers, Ivan] is one of our modern young men, brilliantly educated, with quite a powerful mind, how, however, no longer believes in anything, who has already scrapped and rejected much, too much in life..." (p. 606).

"[W]e are of a broad, Karamzovian nature ... capable of containing all possible opposites and of contemplating both abysses at once, the abyss above us, and abyss of lofty ideals, and the abyss beneath us, an abyss of the lowest and foulest degradation" (p. 699).

"And so we shall part, gentlemen. Let us agree here, by Ilyusha's stone, that we will never forget--first, Ilyushechka, and second, one another. And whatever may happen to us later in life, even if we do not meet for twenty years afterwards, let us always remember how we buried the poor boy, whom we once threw stones at--remember, there by the little bridge?--and whom afterwards we all came to love so much. He was a nice boy, a kind and brave boy, he felt honor and his father's bitter offense made him rise up. And so, first of all, let us remember him, gentlemen, all our lives. And even though we may be involved with the most important affairs, achieve distinction or fall into some great misfortune--all the same, let us never forget how good we once felt here, all together, united by such good and kind feelings as made us, too, for the time that we loved the poor boy, perhaps better than we actually are." (Fydor Dostoevsky. The Brothers Karamazov. Transl. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. North Point Press, 1990, p. 774.)

(I thought this novel was interminable, exasperating, and finally magnificent. No more a murder mystery than is Hamlet, it asks all the big questions, and its greatness lies in its refusal to answer them. Pevear and Volokhonsky's translation breathes new, inspired life into the text, and Dostoevsky's passionate, compassionate eye -- on his way to his son's burial, a father bends down to retrieve a flower that has fallen on the snow -- sees and embraces everything. If it's true, as someone once wrote, that reading only begins with rereading, let reading begin here! In the shadow of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, practically everything written in the 20th century, with the possible exception of Faulkner, Toni Morrison's Beloved, and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, read like sketches, drawing room exercises. But then, if you can't see anything past your own doorstep, what else is there to write about, besides alcoholics ripping electrical wire out of houses in order to pay for another shot of booze?)